


Red Rings

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: Holding [22]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Blood and Gore, Graphic Description of Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 21:49:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19186099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Patrice is a little surprised when play is blown dead, and at first he thinks there’s going to be a tripping call until he starts to realize that something’s seriously wrong. Brad’s flailing with his right arm, trying to get up on his knees but they keep sliding out from under him. He’s dropped his stick and flung his glove so that his left hand can be on his face, he spat out his mouthguard… the ice is the wrong color and so is his jersey. It doesn’t register fully, what this is, Patrice doesn’t understand what happened. All he knows is that Brad’s in trouble, somehow, and both the linesmen are grabbing onto his husband and yelling for the medical trainers. They look panicked.





	Red Rings

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I Know That...](https://archiveofourown.org/works/840603) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> Inspired by the above-listed work. You should really go read that one, it's very good. (For some reason the author gave up ownership of it *shrugs*)

“Guys, wait ’til we’re back at the hotel for once,” Krug groans from somewhere on the right.

They pull back from each other and Brad starts laughing. “It’s for good luck,” he insists, smiling smugly at their team mates.

Patrice rolls his eyes alongside everyone else, even though he’s not only the other half of that annoying equation but also failing to stop grinning like an idiot right now. “Come on, _ange,_ try not to drive everyone crazy, okay?”

“No promises,” Brad cackles as they all get up and move into the hall.

Patrice struggles not to take off his glove so he can play with it again. It’s still new and strange, a foreign presence against his skin even though it’s really nothing particularly interesting to look at. Just a loop of stainless steel (because it can stand up better against hockey conditions than gold or silver would), with the date stamped into the inside of the day he’d finally been allowed to wear it. Next to him, Brad is apparently having the same temptation, because he keeps raising his hand slightly but then putting it back down at his side over and over again.

“If you can’t behave, I’m going to have Bruce take it away from you until the game is over,” Patrice jokes.

“Shut up,” his husband grins back. “I can be good.”

They got married right before the bye week so that they could go relax together away from the stress of the league, and this is the first game since then. Patrice can’t blame Brad for being so hyper, because it’s buzzing under his skin, too. So much so that he doesn’t even mind their first game back being on Long Island instead of at home.

And so the ritual begins: warm up, tossing pucks over the glass for the kids gathered there wearing Bruins jerseys. A few more minutes of waiting. Then they’re out there for real, and it’s the fourth line who will take the first shift. Patrice is okay with that, though. They do a really good job. The Isles are a defense-first team, so if they can just get the defense to collapse, it shouldn’t even be that challenging of a game.

Patrice and Brad fling themselves over the half-wall for a line change, while Pasta is a couple seconds behind so that they won’t get a too many men penalty. So early in the game and the ice is beautiful, mostly undamaged still and ready to be cut by his skates. He’s insanely jittery right now, like he had ten cups of coffee or something, so when he slaps the puck towards Brad he can already tell he miscalculated the second it leaves his stick blade. It ends up in his husband’s skates - Brad scrabbles for it briefly and then there’s Eberle, trying to steal it back. The result is Brad sprawling forward, landing face-first on Lehner’s leg.

Patrice is a little surprised when play is blown dead, and at first he thinks there’s going to be a tripping call until he starts to realize that something’s seriously wrong. Brad’s flailing with his right arm, trying to get up on his knees but they keep sliding out from under him. He’s dropped his stick and flung his glove so that his left hand can be on his face, he spat out his mouthguard… the ice is the wrong color and so is his jersey. It doesn’t register fully, what this is, Patrice doesn’t understand what happened. All he knows is that Brad’s in trouble, somehow, and both the linesmen are grabbing onto his husband and yelling for the medical trainers. They look panicked.

Patrice goes over and reaches for Brad one-handed, only to lose his stick a second later as a hundred and eighty pounds of wounded hockey player drops into his arms. Brad’s hand isn’t on his face - it’s covering the side of his neck, and in place of his voice his eyes are screaming _help me it hurts it HURTS_ because all that comes out of his mouth right now is red froth. Patrice grabs on, tries to carry him. It can’t be done, they both collapse under Brad’s dead weight, but Patrice still makes an effort to drag him closer to the bench where he can be taken to safety. Nothing makes any sense. Brad’s bleeding, he’s bleeding so much, it’s all over them both now as his other glove gets dropped so he can rip off his helmet and throw it aside.

More blood. It’s everywhere, a horrible dark red that’s probably ruining their uniforms and will have to be scraped off the ice. Then there’s arms and hands, prying them apart. Patrice won’t let go for a split second until he figures out that help has arrived, then he gives up Brad to the medics and watches a towel get jammed to the side of his husband’s neck. He’s frozen in place on his knees, watching as they practically drag a stumbling Brad down the tunnel, leaving a trail of blood smears all across the ice.

Once Brad has left the boundary of his vision, Patrice looks back and sees a blue jersey moving around over there, picking up things from out of the blood. Stick. Glove. Two small objects he can’t make out. He knows the number on that jersey, **55** , a much-loved team mate who got traded (in a lot of ways too soon). Johnny drops off Brad’s stuff at the Bruins’ bench while the ice gets cleaned up, then slowly comes over and pulls Patrice to his feet.

“Uh, I found this by his glove… is this Marchy’s?”

Brad’s wedding ring is dropped into his palm - even that has blood on it. Patrice nods, but he can’t move his watering eyes from the small object. He never imagined… usually he’s the one who gets hurt, but now…

“I think they want you back now,” Johnny points out quietly. There’s so much pity in his eyes when he looks at Patrice, who’s standing here crying in the middle of the ice arena while probably every camera in the building is fixed on them. “I’m sorry, man.”

All he can do is nod a second time, because right now he’s managing to stay quiet with just the occasional sniffle but if he tries to talk he knows he’ll burst out sobbing and never be able to stop. Patrice slowly glides to the bench and sits as his own gloves and stick are passed down to him. There’s that awful red, all over his sleeves and the team crest on his torso. There’s some on his socks, too, around his knees. This image will probably visit him in his nightmares.

Patrice doesn’t know what else to do, so he puts Brad’s ring onto his own finger beside its twin before stuffing his hands back into his gloves. He’s not hurt, there’s no excuse for him not to keep playing. Somehow, though, he doesn’t get sent again. Pasta gets shuffled in at a couple points, but Bruce keeps Patrice parked on the bench until the first intermission.

The locker room is like listening to snow falling - silent, but not exactly (if nowhere near as pleasant to hear). Everyone goes through the motions of drying out all their sweaty gear before putting it back on, but there isn’t a word, not even from their head coach. Only Tuukka seems unaffected, stone-faced like always. It’s thanks to him and him alone that the game is still scoreless, because every Bruins line has been folding pathetically since Brad got hurt. Even Pasta, their ray of sunshine, can’t find a reason to smile right now.

Patrice’s hands shake as he re-tapes his socks, which still have blood crusted into them. His jersey is even worse; it would take probably an entire gallon of bleach to make it white again.

Z sits next to him, puts an arm across his shoulders while he stares at his ruined uniform. “I’ll have to… have to get a new one,” Patrice whispers. “Look at it. It’s destroyed.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Z murmurs, squeezing him from the side. “It’s just a shirt. The medical trainers said he was still conscious when they got him on the ambulance, so he’ll probably be okay.”

Patrice can’t answer - his throat refuses to make words. His fingers ball up, bunching the shoulders of his jersey, and then he’s bent in half with his eyes squeezed shut as the sobs finally break free and wrack him on their way out. He’s grabbed and pulled upright, then held from all directions, a terrible group hug as the whole team presses in and tries to comfort him. _Marchy’s so tough. He’ll be okay. He’ll just need stitches or something to fix his neck and he’ll be back in a couple weeks._ Patrice can’t place the words and voices to which team mates are giving them, he only knows that he’s bawling like a child into his captain’s jersey and he just can’t make it stop.

Two minutes before they have to go back out there, Patrice realizes that he should probably do something safer with both their wedding rings than keeping them on under his glove, so he sticks them in his mouthguard case and puts that back in his gear bag. For something that seemed so alien less than an hour ago, he now feels naked without it.

One minute before they head for the tunnel, the equipment guys turn up and give Patrice his practice jersey to wear instead since his game jersey is ruined. This means he has to toss aside his gloves and helmet, pull off the game jersey, yank on the practice jersey, and then quickly put his gloves and helmet back on again. He’s just picking up his stick when they’re moving to go onto the ice, which means he’s further down the line than he usually is. Compared with everything else, that’s somehow the weirdest thing happening right now until he’s sitting on the Bruins’ bench and realizing that his line still has a hole in it.

Patrice isn’t back on the ice until the third shift change, and for about two seconds everything is fine until Pasta tries passing to him and he steps on the puck like he’s in elementary school peewee hockey again. His leg disappears to some unknown direction, all his weight lands on his stick and snaps it, and then he’s crashing face-first into Lehner’s goal. Whistle. Voices. Screaming, someone screaming at him, _Bergy get up_ like they think he’s deaf or something. Patrice manages to get upright again and there’s Pasta, looking absolutely terrified. Less than a foot away is Lehner, whose right leg pad is stained like Patrice’s socks.

“I’m okay,” he mumbles to his line mate as they head for the dot, even though he’s not sure if that’s actually true or not.

Patrice isn’t really sure how he manages to win that faceoff, but the puck finds Danton who immediately whips it at the corner of the goal over Lehner’s shoulder - and it goes in. The other four are yelling and hugging him, and Patrice follows them to the bench for fist bumps and a shift change, but his whole being is like skin that’s had ice pressed against it too long, unable to register feeling of any kind other than the morbid, persistent idea that _Marchy should’ve been the one taking that shot. It still would’ve gone in, but it’s supposed to be him there._

The other lines are more effective - they keep it mostly in the Isles’ zone and forty five seconds before the end of the period Mojo slips it in under Lehner’s elbow. The second intermission isn’t sawing on Patrice’s nerves as much as the first one was, but he’s starting to get prickly now because he has no idea what’s happening to his husband other than Brad’s in some unfamiliar New York hospital getting his throat and jugular veins sewn back together.

Bruce gives them a talk - _you’re doing fine, keep doing what you’re doing_ \- and Patrice, for the first time in his entire career, tunes most of it out. It’s not by choice, either, so much as the fact he’s unable to think about anything right now except to wonder how Brad’s doing. _I love you, Marchy. Hang in there, Marchy. Come back to us, Marchy._ It runs through his brain on a loop. Maybe if he thinks it hard enough, Brad will be able to hear it somehow.

Besides this one impossible-to-ignore issue, things seem to go fine at first during the 3rd… until an Islander scores after the initial four minutes. Then a second goal, and a third, and the Bruins can’t recover. They lose 3-2 in regulation. Patrice blames the entirety of this on himself, of course, because the second and third Isles goals both happened during his shifts. Even though Brad wasn’t out there with him, there’s no excuse. He should’ve been better.

Patrice throws everything into his gear bag and somehow avoids the media (he suspects his team mates probably helped with that), leaving ahead of everyone so that he can drop off his stuff at the hotel and then go find his husband. He calls three different emergency rooms before he finds out, and then it’s an almost twenty minute cab ride to get there when he probably could’ve walked it in ten if he knew where to go. After that, he has to wait another two hours to see Brad, which means it’s past one in the morning when they let him go up. (He’s only allowed in the first place because they’re married, otherwise the answer would’ve been no.)

Brad’s in intensive care, of course, even though they managed to sew him up quickly enough that the blood loss didn’t deprive his brain of oxygen for too long. It was a close thing, though. The doctor explains that an extra two minutes could’ve meant the beginning of brain damage, and an extra four might’ve been enough to cost Brad his life. It’s terrifying to listen to.

Going into the room, Patrice is reminded just by the smell of this place of all his past injuries, and each bleep of the vitals monitor drives those memories further into his mind’s eye like a railroad spike being steadily hammered down. Brad’s sleeping, which gives Patrice mixed feelings. On the one hand, he’s not in pain. On the other, he’s being still and looks dead, which is scary. There’s a mound of gauze and tape covering fully half his neck and a tube down his throat, held in place with tape. The doctor explained that, too - in case the stitches to his esophagus rip back open somehow, he’ll still have an airway and it’ll give them time to fix it again.

Being intubated is the main reason Brad’s in the ICU, actually, because other than that he’ll be mostly fine once he wakes up from the anesthesia. They’d finished up the surgery around the same time the game ended, apparently, then kept Brad in recovery for an hour and a half until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to come to any time soon. They’d run an EEG just in case and there wasn’t anything wrong with his brain activity, so the doctors reasoned he was just physically exhausted and brought him up to sleep it off.

Sitting there in a dark room and holding Brad’s hand, Patrice almost falls asleep several times in the chair but somehow can’t quite manage it. He’s still too scared that something will happen, maybe the stitches will tear open somehow and Brad will have to go back under the knife.

His husband wakes up at 4:37 in the morning.

Patrice is on the edge of drifting off for probably the hundredth time when Brad’s fingers twitch against his, and the surprise wakes him up enough that he leans closer to the bed and watches carefully. It’s hard to tell at first with the lights off, but he makes out Brad’s eyes opening just a crack, finding his face, and immediately closing. A cranky, irritated noise finds its way out around the tube somehow.

“Marchy, hey… welcome back…”

Brad squeezes his hand, then gives a distressed whimper. Tears start escaping down his temples.

“What is it? Are you in pain, do you want me to get the nurse?”

Brad shrugs and then shakes his head; _it kind of hurts, no I don’t want anyone else here._

“Okay, so… is it the tube?”

Another shrug. Brad’s watering eyes open again and he stares up at Patrice, then lifts his left hand and wiggles his fingers. It takes a few seconds before Patrice can see the words in his expression: _I lost it, I’m sorry, I don’t know where it went._

“Hey, it’s okay,” Patrice assures him, stroking his knuckles with a thumb. “I have it, it’s in my gear bag. Mine’s there, too… I think we shouldn’t wear them during games after this. They might get lost if we have to throw hands.”

Relief visibly washes over Brad and he nods, relaxing and closing his eyes again. He makes another annoyed sound and taps the part of the tube that’s sticking out of his mouth.

“You want that gone?”

Nod.

“Okay,” Patrice smiles. “I’ll go ask them about it, if you want.”

Nod. _Yes. Get this fucking thing out of my throat._

He kisses Brad’s forehead before getting up and going to the nurse’s station, and ten minutes later they’re injecting something into Brad’s IV to make him relax before pulling the tube out. Brad stays loopy for awhile after they’re done.

“This bed sucks,” he whispers hoarsely. “Hospitals should have memory foam.”

“That’s okay, you’ll probably get to go home in a couple of days.”

“You come with me…?”

“I don’t think so. We’re about to go play the Preds, and then we’ll be back on Wednesday, remember? It won’t be that long.”

“I wanna be where you are,” Brad protests.

“I know, but you’re hurt. You need to get looked at by the medical guys so they can tell you how long until you get to play again.”

“I can play…”

Patrice chuckles. “No, not like this you can’t. There’s a hole in your neck…” It floods back into his head, all that blood everywhere and Brad with this look of extreme pain but not able to scream because he was choking on his own fluids. Patrice leans across the bed and hides his tears in Brad’s chest.

“Don’t cry, Pat,” Brad mumbles, running fingers through his hair. “’S okay…”

“You scared me,” Patrice hiccups, muffled. “I didn’t even know what happened until after it was over.” He rubs his face dry on Brad’s hospital gown and then repositions so he can look. “So this was a pretty shitty thing to happen for our first game after we got married, huh?”

“Yeah… really sucks. I barely got to do anything.” Brad sounds beyond tired and Patrice thinks he’ll fall asleep soon. “Least you got my ring back.”

“Oh, we have Johnny to thank for that one. He rescued it and your mouthguard, I was just sitting there being useless.”

“Johnny Boychuk?”

“Yeah. Just like with Krej’s teeth.”

Brad snorts. “Good thing this happened with him around, then, huh?”

“I wish it didn’t happen at all.”

“Yeah.” Brad yawns. “Love you, Bergy.”

“I love you, too.”

“No, like, seriously. I just love you so much, you should know…”

He doesn’t even finish the sentence before he’s asleep. Patrice shifts in order to kiss his cheek and then the spot between his eyebrows. “I do know,” he murmurs before sitting back down again to wait for morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm waving my artistic license a little bit as far as the medical shit goes. I know some stuff, but not as much as actual doctors obvs, so please forgive me if I got stuff wrong.
> 
> Please comment, seriously.


End file.
